The 2nd Annual 40 Best Political Quotes Of 2010

39) There’s going to be a tendency on the part of our people to be in denial about all this. If you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call, there’s no hope of waking up. — Evan Bayh on Scott Brown’s Win

38) Liberals don’t care. Their approach is to rip out society’s foundations without asking if they serve any purpose. Why do we have immigration laws? What’s with these borders? Why do we have the institution of marriage, anyway? What do we need standardized tests for? Hey, I like Keith Richards — why not make heroin legal? Let’s take a sledgehammer to all these load-bearing walls and just see what happens! — Ann Coulter

37) But here’s the thing about being honest: All the liars HATE you for it, and most of the people in the world are liars. They lie to their bosses, they lie to their families, they lie to themselves, they lie so much they don’t even know they’re lying anymore. If you have the courage to be honest even a little bit all those people will hate you for it, because their lie is reflected in your honesty. Oscar Wilde wasn’t kidding when he said, “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you. — Tucker Maxx

36) We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people. So just punishing rich people is as bad for the economy as punishing anyone. Let’s not punish anyone. Let’s keep taxes low and let’s cut spending. — Rand Paul

35) What’s curious about the left’s current obsession with Timothy McVeigh is that it proves that — despite a frantic search for 15 years — liberals have come across no better evidence of burgeoning “right-wing extremist” violence than a drug-taking, self-described “agnostic” who was thrown out of the Michigan Militia and who proclaimed, “Science is my religion.” That sounds more like Bill Maher than Rush Limbaugh. — Ann Coulter

34) This nation is on a course where if we don’t do something about it, get federal situation, the fiscal policy [under control], we’re Greece. We’re a banana republic. Our status as a nation is threatened by what we’ve got coming at us in the area of deficit and debt. And it’s only a few more years, at the most, that we have to work with here before the market says, ‘Sorry, your currency is something we can not continue to defend.’ — Judd Gregg

33) Since the 1960s, much of the American church has been stampeding away from its allegedly “judgmental” past. As we de-stigmatize divorce, our families dissolve. As we de-stigmatize illegitimacy, fathers vanish. In matters public (see, for example, the Christian community’s utter failure to oppose no-fault divorce) and private (the reluctance to “judge” our close friends when they stray into manifestly destructive behaviors), the message is clear: “I’m not one of those judgmental Christians.”

We need to learn that there’s a difference between judgment and reading comprehension. You are not making a judgment when you say that homosexual sex is wrong, that God hates divorce, and that premarital sex is a sin. God made those judgments, and you’re merely communicating the judgment He made, not making one of your own. Further, in withholding, watering down, or denying those truths, you are not making anyone’s life better. You are making their lives worse. — David French

32) The fact is that no one wants to be a farm worker, not even farm workers, precisely because we have so many foreign farm workers. In other words, the low pay and appalling working conditions in farm labor are a direct result of excessive illegal immigration and agricultural guest-worker programs, which keep the labor market looser than it would otherwise be and reduce incentives for change. With fewer field hands available, farmers would do two things: First, raise wages and improve working conditions (because given the right circumstances, there are a non-trivial number of Americans and legal immigrants willing to do farm work). Second, they’d accelerate efforts at finding ways of getting by with less labor; i.e., mechanize. — Mark Krikorian

31) Tolerance is a two way street. Those exhorting tolerance return none. At some point when it flows only one way, it stops. — Steph C., Redstate

30) For states’ rights advocates, the Constitution is like a contract that is openly violated by one party with impunity. On paper, the states remain sovereign powers, while in reality the federal government appears able to dictate everything from the ingredients of school lunches to speed limits. Congress now routinely collects taxes in order to return the money to the states with conditions on their conforming to federal demands. — Jonathan Turley

29) The peasants have seen the future — Greece and France — and concluded that it does not work. Hence their opposition to Obama’s proudly transformational New Foundation agenda. Their logic is impeccable: Only the most blinkered intellectual could be attempting to introduce social democracy to America precisely when the world’s foremost exemplar of that model — Europe — is in chaotic meltdown. — Charles Krauthammer

28) As has been said, standards are always out of date — that is why we call them standards. — George Will

27) The problem isn’t that things are collapsing. It’s that not enough things are collapsing. General Motors, AIG, and the government of California have committed enough errors to merit immediate extinction, but there they still are. Yet the political establishment continues to argue that the market needs to be prevented from delivering rough justice to sinners. — Tim Cavanaugh

26) With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take (Al Gore’s) Nobel Prize back. — Donald Trump

25) The liberal argument is easily grasped by children, because it rarely includes the ideas of costs or tradeoffs. That’s why children and teenagers tend to be liberal in their thinking. Do you want to feed the hungry? Clothe the naked? Heal the sick? Boy do I!!! These are very simplistic propositions, and furthermore come from a place of pure emotion — empathy. Their is little intellectual thrust behind these impulses. And certainly there is none of the higher-order mathematical-type thinking involved in cost-benefit analysis ad risk management and moral hazard and unintended consequences and the free-rider problem and so on. But their claims of complex, nuanced intellectual appeals are most spectactularly self-refuted when they trot out — as they are wont to do — children to repeat the exact same arguments they make. — Ace

24) Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place. Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing. This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that “bravely” trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force. — Ross Douthat

23) I’ve been where these girls are. I can tell every single girl out there who sleeps around with abandon that there is one thing that will stick with you forever: you will regret it. There will come a day where you will meet that man, and you will wish you could take it all back. Giving yourself away to any stranger you barely not is not empowering. It’s degrading. — Cassy Fiano

21) The progressive agenda is actually legitimated by the incomprehension and anger it elicits: If the people do not resent and resist what is being done on their behalf, what is being done is not properly ambitious. If it is comprehensible to its intended beneficiaries, it is the work of insufficiently advanced thinkers. — George Will

20) It used to be said “war is hell.” A more accurate description today might be “war is purgatory.” Political correctness demands that reason must prevail, even though war is conducted precisely because reasoning, aka diplomacy, has failed. We used to understand this. When America was threatened during WWll, we didn’t wring our collective hands wondering “why Japan and Germany hated us.” Such politically correct self-flagellation would have been dismissed as the absurd nonsense it truly is. We didn’t drop atomic bombs on Japan to prolong WWll, but to shorten it. We didn’t do it to increase casualties but reduce them, in the long run. This is where the West has lost its way. — Arnold Ahlert

18) If there is no moral foundation for a system of laws, then the law is reduced to “These are the rules. They’re the rules because I say so, and I control all of the guys with guns.” We can ask those who survived Pol Pot, Stalin, or Mao how that worked out. (Hitler’s Nazism was not state atheism; it was filled with the occult. Anyone who watches Leni Riefenstahl‘s “Triumph of the Will“ and doesn’t see religion is willfully blind.)

So the law is either codification of morality or it is thuggery. The real argument is about which moral code will be implemented by the law. To claim to reject a moral underpinning for the law is either a wish to live in a place where the law is whatever one guy says it is today, or else it is a disingenuous attempt to substitute your own moral code for the one that has already been codified. — Beregond

17) When the private sector fails, the solution is more government. When the government fails, the solution is more government. — Glenn Reynolds

16) We’re on the brink of a world in which the wealthiest nations, from Canada to Norway to Japan, can barely project meaningful force to their own borders while the nickel ‘n’ dime basket-cases go nuclear. — Mark Steyn

15) It is not enough for the insecure left to deem a position wrong; if it’s merely wrong, it needs to be argued about, and it can’t survive that. It must instead be morally aborrent, so that the zealot reacts to the toxin of questioning much like a jogger coming across a decomposing body on the side of the road — it must be internalized that the correct response to such a horror is to retch, and faint, and call the authorities post-haste.

This is how the leftist faith protects itself from the infection of doubt. (Meanwhile, of course, patting itself on the back for being so open-minded…) — Ace

14) The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us. — Peggy Noonan

13) One of the big failings of liberalism – and by “big,” I mean this isn’t just a turn-off to dedicated conservatives, I think it creeps out most middle-of-the-road people – is that liberals are very quick to abandon any discussion of whether their programs are effective, ineffective, or possibly damaging. They don’t stick with this analysis very long at all. They’re constantly distracted by something else. And the “something else” is almost always some tantalizing inspection of some ideological opponent’s unworthiness. — Morgan Freeberg

12) Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate. — Sarah Palin

11) President Obama said he is going to use the Gulf disaster to push a new energy bill through Congress. How about using the Gulf disaster to fix the Gulf disaster? — Jay Leno

10) The feminists of the sixties are the least feminine women I know. — Lisa Mei Norton

9) What’s wrong with “the new elite?” Forget cultural insularity or smugness. The main problem with the “new elite” is that they’re not an elite at all. That is, they aren’t particularly smart, or competent. — Glenn Reynolds

7) The tea party saved the Republican Party. In a broad sense, the tea party rescued it from being the fat, unhappy, querulous creature it had become, a party that didn’t remember anymore why it existed, or what its historical purpose was. The tea party, with its energy and earnestness, restored the GOP to itself. — Peggy Noonan

6) Quite frankly, I’m exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the man for change I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are right now. — Velma Hart to Barack Obama